Photo: ClutchPoints

Former NBA player Caron Butler confirmed story about him and Kobe Bryant while the two were teammates in Los Angeles. The 2011 NBA champion revealed on The Lowe Podcast that he had a habit of drinking Mountain Dew which was noticed by Kobe.

The Lakers legend saw that Butler was ‘huffing and puffing’ too much during his first game when he joined the Lakers in 2004. Kobe asked what he was using that made him feel that way on the court.

And one time Bryant saw Butler drinking Mountain Dew on a bus and told him to stop it. The two-time NBA All-Star recalled that he quit Mountain Dew for the remainder of the season. But he was back to his old habit once he got traded to the Wizards in 2005.

Via Christian Rivas of Silver Screen & Roll:

“Oh 100%. Immediately. Because I started blackout sessions with Kobe right after he signed a contract, and he had signed a contract. We was working out every day … And fast-forward to our first game of the season, and he’s just like ‘man, you look good, your game is sharp, but you be like, getting winded sometimes. You’re huffing and puffing a little bit too much. You’re a Mercedes Benz, you’re a hybrid, you’re not supposed to be huffing and puffing like that. What type of fuel you using?’

“And I was like ‘fuel, what?’ And he was like ‘man, you gotta be premium. What are you putting in your body?’ I was just like ‘I eat good,’ like me thinking from the South, like ‘I eat good. Whatever I eat is good because it’s good to me.’ You know what I mean?

“So we was on the bus and he comes to the back and I literally had a Mountain Dew, one-liter or two-liter bottle, and I immediately tried to hide it and he was like ‘come on, man, you can’t be putting that in your body, what the hell you doing CB?’ And from that moment I was like [expletive], I’m gonna stop drinking Mountain Dew. And I just pivoted away from Mountain Dew for the remainder of the season … But the second I went to Washington I was back on that [expletive]. I couldn’t stop, man. But I held true to it, I only drunk it in the third and fourth quarters.”

Butler averaged 15.5 points, 5.8 rebounds and 1.9 assists per game for the Lakers in 2004-05 season. It was a rough year for Los Angeles as they finished 11th in the Western Conference and missed the playoffs.

Listen to the full episode of The Lowe Podcast with Caron Butler: